Whether you're a casual TV fan or an avid viewer, you're bound to recognize Patrick Heusinger. The 35-year-old actor has racked up acting credits on the likes of Gossip Girl, 30 Rock, The Good Wife, Law and Order: SVU and, more recently, Hulu's Casual and Bravo's Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce in his 11 years in the business. Now, he's making his blockbuster debut in explosive fashion as The Hunter, the hired gun stalking none other than Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, the sequel to the 2012's Jack Reacher. Heusinger might call the experience of being cast opposite his childhood hero surreal—if he could remember it. "The whole thing feels like a foggy dream," he tells BAZAAR.com. "Suddenly I was in it, and then five months later I was spit out of it. I was back home in Los Angeles with my head spinning trying to figure out what the hell just happened." Below, Heusinger opens up about playing a psychopath, the unexpected stage role that landed him the Jack Reacher part and the High School Musical moment that led him to acting in the first place:

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Harper's BAZAAR: Tell me about your character in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.

Patrick Heusinger: My character is called The Hunter. He's the main antagonist in the movie. In a nutshell, he's a slightly deranged natural born killer who's weirdly determined to succeed at his job, whatever his employment is. He's a mercenary and there's a high body count for him in this film. He's kind of what Jack Reacher would have become if he didn't stay on the moral high ground. They were both in the army, they were both probably army rangers, he was on his way to getting a major-type position like Jack Reacher, then he probably had a poor psych evaluation one day and was discharged for fear that he might do something unruly on the battlefield. I think my guy sort of fell in love with making money but was also very good at handling these sorts of jobs and doing special ops work. It's one of those things where he gets back after serving in Afghanistan for so long and he only knows how to do one thing. He also has no allegiance to the country, where Jack Reacher is completely dedicated to the integrity of the system here in the United States.

HB: Was this your first time taking on the role of a villain?

PH: I had done a little bit one other time. This character [in Jack Reacher] is a psychopath, but I had been hired by Carlton Cuse and Randall Wallace (Carlton Cuse was the showrunner for Lost, he created The Strain, and then Randall Wallace wrote Braveheart, among other things) for a Civil War pilot they did for Amazon. It didn't go forward, but they had hired me to be their lead villain in that show and the character was a sociopath, which I had never played before. I went into very deep research as to what exactly that meant and how sociopaths function psychologically and within the world. Sociopaths are more complicated psychopaths; the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath is a sociopath is incredibly charming. There are a lot of sociopaths that are CEOs. They don't necessarily kill people but they're able to walk into a big social function and make everybody think they're the kindest, coolest, smartest, most interesting person in the room. But their entire purpose in every conversation is to manipulate people into getting what they want. Psychopaths don't have that charming skill set. They definitely manipulate, but they do it through focused, unskilled means. They're more obsessive. A sociopath can imitate emotions, where a psychopath really doesn't have that capacity. They can't fool people into thinking anything and they're usually lacking major empathy for anybody besides themselves.

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You get a role like this in a big action movie [like Jack Reacher] and you can go one of two ways: you can paint in broad strokes, which happens a lot in action films, or you can get very detailed. I'm a trained actor and I can always tone it down, I can always simplify the work I've done. But if I'm asked to bring the nuanced and complicated work, I'll have it in my pocket, and all that information helps. I read as many books about the psychology of a psychopath as I could and I researched what exactly happens to soldiers. One of the pieces I threw in there was that there's a good chance The Hunter was traumatized. He's probably experiencing one form or another of post-traumatic stress. But we're talking about an extreme case where he had a childhood trauma that made him react to PTSD in a way that one of our mentally stable American soldiers would not. Because they have the capacity to cope and possibly, hopefully come up with a way to deal with the trauma that they perceived over there, where this guy doesn't have that or, more interestingly, maybe doesn't even feel it—he would experience the trauma and go numb and see that as a skill.

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In Jack Reacher: Never Go Back

David James/Paramount Pictures

HB: In addition to all this research to get you in the mindset of the character, how did you prep physically?

PH: I had just come off of doing a play in Los Angeles which actually got me the role. It was called Bent and it was at the Mark Taper Forum. I was playing a homosexual in 1930 to 1934 Berlin who is eventually put into a concentration camp for the second half of the play. I had lost about 38 pounds for that; I had come into the role at about 205 pounds after doing an action role for live-action material for this X-Box video game called Quantum Break. I then got the play and lost 38 pounds. Then when I came on to Jack Reacher, I had just taken my girlfriend on vacation and ate everything I could. I put on about 15 pounds, so when I met [the Jack Reacher team] I was clocking in at about 180. They looked at me and were like, "You're just gonna lose five pounds, we're gonna keep you skinny." It's a conversation I have a lot because I change myself a lot. Some roles you don't want to be big, bulky, muscle-y guy and some roles you want to be a lean, marathon-runner physical type. And some roles you just don't want to be in shape. When I did Casual, I just let myself put on weight because he's a schoolteacher. He's not meant to be muscle-y. But for this role [in Jack Reacher] they wanted him to be lean, mean, very sinew-y, and it added a cool effect because my face for most of the film is very—not quite gaunt—but it has a sort of sunken feel. It's incredible how insane I look. I actually look like a bad guy. When I look at myself in the mirror, I don't see the bad guy.

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HB: Does changing your body help you get into character?

PH: For a role like this, I think it does. This is a guy who's completely obsessed with his job and to stay in the kind of shape they wanted me in, I had to be the same. I'm not a method actor but it certainly does help to have that kind of dedication. I treated my preparation like I was in the military. I didn't go out ever. I went out for drinks probably twice in five months. I lived very monastically, which is the way this guy would. That was sort of fun to get into, to wake up every morning and work out and watch every single thing I'm putting in my body so I could be a clearheaded and prepared for this grueling shoot. But for some roles, like when I was doing Bent, that was harder and I didn't find that helpful because I was so calorie deprived, my brain wasn't getting food. I was eating with the help of a nutritionist so I was definitely putting in the appropriate calories and vitamins and minerals into my body; however, it was still so little that if I had the tiniest piece of sugar, my brain would go crazy. If I had some alcohol during the run of that play, my brain would go crazy. I would end up not being as focused or as clearheaded as I would have liked to be during the run of the performances. I would lose those quality impulses that you lean on when you're acting because of malnutrition. basically. But I looked skinny. There're pictures I have of opening night where I'm standing next to friends and I look sickly, dangerously skinny.

HB: How long did that play run for?

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PH: June through August of last year. It was a very exciting production. The director, Moisés Kaufman, just received the national medal of the arts from President Obama this year. He wrote and directed The Laramie Project and he has directed several Pulitzer prize-winning plays. He's a pretty profound director in the theater. It was neat because the role I played was originated by Ian McKellen in 1979 and he came. I didn't know he was there and I walked out at the end of the play, which is a very intense play—my character is required to do some really horrible things—and the director was waiting backstage and he goes, "Obviously I didn't want to tell you guys, but Ian was here today" and we, of course, freaked out. I was standing by the stage door and he walked right up and started crying and gave me a hug. He said some really beautiful, kind things, one of which was, "It's so much harder to watch than it is to do."

PH: [Jack Reacher] is the longest I'd ever shot anything—and let's be clear, this is my first studio feature film—so there was a huge learning curve. I only had a three-week break from the beginning of Bent, so I went from one thing to the next. I got back [from shooting Jack Reacher] and there was a sense of, "Oh my God, what do I do now?" I don't have personal trainers around me all the time, I'm not on a meal plan, which I had been on for almost a year straight. There was a lot of sleeping. It's pretty tough on your loved ones to try to get back into a rhythm, especially when all you want to do is do nothing. I want to keep exercising but I also want to go, "What did I just miss out on in the past year?" There are these shows everyone's talking about. I'm an actor, I want to see all the movies and TV shows. So you do a little bit of those things and you try your best to reconnect with your friends and family. You're working so hard and so many hours, you simply don't get to visit with everybody when you're gone for five months. That's part of the trade in we make with this career. You don't get to maintain the intimacy you would like to. One of the big things I was doing was working on reestablishing that. Obviously I was talking to my parents and my girlfriend all the time, but it's one thing to finally be in the same room and get to be with each other and just hang out.

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HB: Tell me about working with Tom Cruise.

PH: I love the guy. You can hear how hard I work, I think, from these stories I'm telling. I'm incredibly dedicated and I'm sort of known as that to a point that people tease me about it. I'm obsessive about my job and I want it to be as great as it can possibly be, especially right now in these early parts of my career. I want to make sure everything has my 100%. I had heard that Tom was the same way, that he is incredibly dedicated. I was very excited to meet him and I was, honest to God, weirdly surprised that the guy makes me look lazy. I was like, "He's really gonna respond to how hard I work." I think he does think I'm a hard worker, but he makes me look like I'm doing nothing. The guy is at the gym before anybody in the morning. He's that kind of employee that's first to arrive, last to leave. He's constantly working on other projects in between: at one point he was doing reshoots for a movie he did prior to Jack Reacher, he's pre-planning Mission Impossible 6 and he's doing table reads for Top Gun 2, all at the same time. The guy is a machine. He loves it and it shows.

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With Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back

Chiabella James/Paramount Pictures

HB: Were you anxious at the thought of facing off against Tom when you were cast?

PH: Honestly, I don't remember. When I look back, I'm like, "Oh shit, man. I just worked with this director that I grew up watching, who I've loved watching. I just worked with this actor that I grew up idolizing." I never told him that on set, obviously—I didn't want to make the guy be like, "All right, take it easy"—but I did! I can't tell you how many times I saw The Firm, how many times I saw Top Gun. I've watched A Few Good Men too many times to count. This was all before I became an actor.

Here's how I got the role: Paramount Pictures casting executive Joseph Middleton comes to see Bent. Two weeks after I close the play, I get a phone call that I was thought was like, "We're gonna have you do a stunt assessment in New Orleans." I audition on a Friday and then I get the phone call on Tuesday: "You have the job." They negotiate for a week. They call me the morning after they worked out my contract and say, "We need you to fly out to New Orleans today." The next day I'm shaking hands with Tom Cruise and [director] Ed Zwick and Don Granger, our producer, and sitting down and starting to break down the character. I didn't have time to react.

HB: Are you planning to head back to the stage anytime soon?

PH: Yes, I am! I can't wait to get back. I love working on the stage. You can get an education in any genre of the entertainment industry, but there's a specific kind you get from doing live theater. I'm just trying to be patient. I've actually only done three professional plays in my life. One was a tiny, critically-acclaimed off-Broadway play, Next Fall, which the New York Times came to see. We were only supposed to run for three months and then next thing we know, Elton John is moving us to Broadway with the entire original cast, we're nominated for Pulitzer Prize and we're nominated for Best Play Tony Award. We were sort of like, "What is happening here?" But after doing that play, I realized that's what doing a great play is supposed to feel like.

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With plays and my stage work, I protect it. I don't want do a play where I'm around people who feel like they're taking a paycheck. Nobody's making it in plays right now. You can't do a play and buy a house, even at the Broadway level. The reason I moved to Los Angeles is because when I closed Next Fall, I woke up the next morning and was like, "I will never be able to raise a family and buy a house on this salary." We acknowledge as a community that we can't make money here. So everybody is sacrificing something and in a way, losing money to do a play. So if I'm gonna get there, I want everyone to be dedicated to it. It has to be a different kind of dedication than even you find in film, because you have to contribute so much of your vulnerability and your heart and you have to get together an ensemble, which is a really big deal because you see each other day in and day out. So I'm very protective of that opportunity and I only really allow myself to become a part of it if I know I'm gonna be in steady and safe hands. The reason I did Bent was because I had seen Moisés Kaufman's productions and plays. I had watched him in interviews for years. I knew so much about this guy before he and I shook hands. I knew I was going to walk into the project and leave an entirely changed actor who was significantly more skilled than when he arrived. And that's what happened with him. I do want to go back to the stage, but I want to be in the healthiest, most incredible environment that I can procure for myself.

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HB: Have you thought about going into writing, directing, producing?

PH: No and I don't think I ever will. Writing, I'm not great. Let me be frank: I'm terrible. I would try to come to the Jack Reacher set all the days I wasn't working and I would watch Ed direct. That guy is so wildly intelligent and so is Tom. Tom understands the edit of the film as we're shooting it. I'll get that, at some point, but I don't have the director's vision and I almost don't want it. Every time I try to have the director's vision, I end up looking at the story from the wrong angle and I prefer seeing it through the character's eyes because it allows me to submit myself to the character's experience, first and foremost. On stage, you need to have a director's eye because you're your own editor, and my director's eye on stage is very strong, But on film you have to submit to the human being you're playing. You have to try your best to truthfully portray that image, those feelings, that energy, and then you have to give it all up to the editor and the director. You just have to trust and let them work. I fear in becoming a director, I would sacrifice some of that.

Kei Moreno

HB: Growing up, did you always want to be an actor?

PH: No, in comparison to the people I went to college with and the people I work with, I started very late. I did my first musical in ninth grade, I did my first play when I was 17. I was playing baseball, I was in a band—I was kind of a stupid kid who didn't know what he wanted to do in a military town. I was good at public speaking but I was also very hyperactive and sort of unruly. I was in gifted classes and accelerated IQ classes, and then some teachers grabbed me and said, "Listen, we really thing you would do well in a play. It might be a great place for your energy." And I got a taste for it. Walking out of the first play I ever did, I looked at my mom and said, "I'm gonna do that for the rest of my life." I had the baseball coach giving me the High School Musical speech: "Are you gonna do the musical or are you gonna play baseball?" The coach sat me down and said, "I don't think you're good enough to make the team this year but I do think you're going to when you put on some muscle mass. But you gotta pick one, because this is a year-round thing." And like any ninth grade heterosexual boy, I looked around like, "There's really beautiful girls in that room, and there's a bunch of dudes concussing each other every now and then in this room." And being the absolute total nerd that I was, I didn't really have a group that I fit into, I never dated a girl before. I was like, "Yeah, I'm gonna go do the musical. I'm gonna go where Vanessa Hudgens is."

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HB: What's next for you?

PH: I traveled a lot this summer. We went to Alaska, we went to Europe for a bit, we went to Zion National Park. I was purposely keeping my head down. I was like, "Let's wait and see what happens when the movie comes out." I've had some projects come my way but I want to wait and pick the right thing. I want to make sure it's something I'm very excited about, something I feel like I can get myself into passionately. What I'm really holding out for—it doesn't matter if it's a play or if it's a film—I'm really looking for a story and a character that I connect with, that I can devote myself to, because for the first time ever, I find myself in financial stability where I'm able to do that. It's the most fortunate position I've ever been in as an actor. For the first time, I can say no to jobs because I'm not worried about where my meals are coming from. Now I can really put my head down and focus on that. I'm reading a lot of scripts that are coming my way, I'm checking things out and waiting to find that thing, like what happened with Bent, that just screams at me and says, "You have to do this. There's no other option."

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